


takes an ocean not to break

by celeste9



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Introspection, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 22:59:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7011721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The future is a blank slate and Natasha is terrified. (spoilers for Civil War)</p>
            </blockquote>





	takes an ocean not to break

**Author's Note:**

> Instead of continuing to struggle with my WIPs and unwritten challenges, I wrote something completely new. As you do. Inspired by a list of sentence prompts I found on Tumblr, for "I'll take the couch." Title from The National.

He doesn’t even look surprised when he opens the door to see her standing there. He merely steps back, lets her in, closes and locks the door behind them both.

Natasha stands there, drinks him in. Bruce’s dark hair is curling, slightly damp like he’s showered recently, a hint of gray peppered through. His sweats are loose and comfortable but they look new. She imagines all of his clothing must be new.

“Your coat,” Bruce says belatedly, as if he’s forgotten how to treat guests. Presumably he doesn’t have many.

Perhaps Natasha is his first.

Unbuttoning the coat and slipping it off her shoulders, Natasha says, “Got bored of the tropics?”

Bruce shrugs, hanging her coat in a closet that has only one other hangar currently in use. “The heat doesn’t really suit me.”

“But Russia does?”

“I have a fondness for the culture,” he murmurs, a blush coloring his cheekbones.

Natasha lets herself smile, faintly surprised she remembers how.

They have dinner, soup that Bruce had had simmering on the stove. He doesn’t ask how she is. He must have seen the news. Natasha doesn’t volunteer anything. She isn’t… She doesn’t think she can say anything, not yet.

She looks at Bruce across the table and thinks of her team all gathered together, Thor slamming back a beer, Clint triumphantly serving his self-proclaimed famous lasagna which even Tony admits isn’t half bad, Steve pumping his fist as he watches the Yankees get scored on, Bruce set just a little bit away from the rest, smiling his shy, nervous smile.

But she can’t think of that. When she thinks of that she thinks of the Other Guy switching off the viewscreen on the quinjet, she thinks of cars falling on Tony, she thinks of Wanda blasting her onto her back, she thinks of herself firing at T’Challa. She thinks of Clint in prison, Clint and Sam and Wanda and that poor sap they’d picked up God knows where.

She can’t think of that.

Bruce has been working in a small pharmacy, he tells her, in a subordinate, near minimum wage capacity.

“Slumming it,” Natasha says.

“Considering all my papers are forged, I find it’s best not to draw attention to myself,” he counters.

“I guess that explains the décor, or lack of it,” Natasha jokes. The apartment is plain, sparsely furnished, impersonal. If not for small touches like the shoes by the door or the mug in the sink it would be hard to believe anyone actually lives here.

He quirks a smile. “I’ve never been much for decorating.”

When they finish Bruce washes the dishes and Natasha dries them. It feels oddly domestic and almost comfortable.

He makes tea and they sit in what passes for a living room, Bruce’s glasses perched on his nose while he reads. He lets Natasha use his laptop.

She composes emails in her head that she knows she can never send. So many of them start with, _I’m sorry._

The apartment is a little too cold, as if Bruce keeps the heat down to save on bills. She is grateful for her thick sweater. The lamp casts a dim glow in the night.

“I’ll take the couch,” Bruce says and Natasha is too tired to argue.

She lets Bruce take an extra pillow off his bed and a spare blanket out of the closet and leave her there, standing alone in the bedroom that doesn’t even feellike Bruce’s. It’s bare, nothing but a couple of scientific journals on the bedside stand next to the lamp and the clock. The walls are empty except for a calendar with landscape photos for each month.

It feels like the sort of a place a person might stay in while they’re waiting for something better, only Natasha knows Bruce isn’t really waiting. He’s escaping, still, hiding from the world but mostly from himself.

Natasha wasn’t ready before. She had tried to do what was right. It blew up in her face. (Unfortunately literally, at times.)

She doesn’t know what’s right anymore.

All her covers are blown. There is a warrant for her arrest. Steve is gone. Tony had looked at her like he had realized he had never known her and never would, like Natasha Romanoff was just another mask she put on.

She thinks she would like to try this escaping thing with Bruce. She wonders if it’s too late now.

Bruce sleeps on the couch. Natasha slides between the cheap sheets in his bed and closes her eyes.

She doesn’t sleep.

She hopes that Clint got to go home. She hopes that after Steve orchestrated that prison break, Clint got to go home to Laura and the kids. She hopes for that more than anything.

Natasha lies on her back in the darkness and wonders what might have happened if Bruce hadn’t been running. She wonders if it might have made a difference. She wonders if it would have gone down the same in Lagos. She wonders if any of them would have had the stomach to stand in the same room as Secretary Ross with Bruce front and center in their minds.

She wonders how she could ever have listened to him, knowing what she knows. She wonders how she dares to let Bruce serve her dinner, to sleep in his bed, knowing that she collaborated with the man who has brought him so much misery.

She supposes in the end it will be just another sin to add to her list.

The future seems open in a way that Natasha isn’t used to. She has nothing, not the Red Room, not the KGB, not S.H.I.E.L.D., not the Avengers. She has no ties, nothing to hold her down and nothing to guide her.

It should feel liberating.

Instead she only feels terrified.

She wonders if she knows how to be Natasha without the Black Widow.

There is someone playing loud music down the hall and someone having what sounds like a very good time on the floor above her. The walls are thin. The mattress is lumpy.

Natasha imagines Bruce living here, just getting by like he’s ordinary, like he isn’t brilliant and gifted, like he isn’t a hero, like he isn’t the best man Natasha knows (and she knows a lot of good men). Her thoughts wander to him in the next room, sleeping on the couch like the gentleman he is.

She wishes he were a bit less of a gentleman. She wishes he were _here._

It is a pipe dream, perhaps. They were over before they had ever had the chance to begin. Maybe now it is actually too late.

Still, Natasha feels an ache in her soul that she thinks perhaps Bruce could fill. She craves something, anything, a connection, the assurance that everything in her life hasn’t gone to shit, that she can still have something that’s good, that’s hers. She had allowed the Avengers to become her family and then that family had broken. She had helped break it. This fierce loneliness feels like it could crush her beneath its weight.

But there is Bruce, so close and yet somehow unattainable. Is this dull, unremarkable life, this choice that he made, is this what he truly wants? Is there no longer a place for her?

Was there ever one?

The future is a blank slate and Natasha is terrified.

Bruce is sleeping on the couch in the next room and Natasha wants him in her arms, if only he would let her.

Natasha doesn’t let herself think about it. She doesn’t allow herself the opportunity to change her mind. She gets out of bed and walks barefoot down the hall. She kneels beside the couch, her eyes adjusting to the lack of light just enough to make out Bruce’s outline.

She reaches out, presses her hand to his shoulder. He shivers beneath her touch; he’s awake.

“Please,” she whispers.

Bruce lifts his arm, raising the blanket he’s lying under. The couch is too small for both of them; Natasha can see that without needing to test it.

She stays crouched there on the floor and leans into him, pressing her face into his chest, into the crook of his shoulder. He wraps his arm around her back and keeps her close. It’s awkward and perfect and exactly what Natasha needs.

“Natasha,” Bruce says, “Natasha,” like he’s not sure he deserves this, and maybe neither of them do. But that’s not the point.

Natasha shudders, and breathes. She can have this.

This is hers.

**_End_ **


End file.
